In 1860, 16-year-old Joshua Slocum escaped a hardscrabble childhood in Nova Scotia by signing on as an ordinary seaman to a merchant ship bound for Dublin. His subsequent journeys took him nearly everywhere: Liverpool, China, Japan, Cape Horn, the Dutch East Indies, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, San Francisco, and Australia. In 1895 Slocum set sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the Spray, a 37-foot sloop, becoming the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo—an odyssey recounted in his classic memoir Sailing Alone Around the World. Here Geoffrey Wolff gives us the rest of the story of Slocum's remarkable life. "Adroitly and economically told, The Hard Way Around is the best of books", opined Nathaniel Philbrick in the New York Times Book Review: "a literary biography that also happens to be an adventure story. After finishing this little book (which I did not want to end), I decided it was worthy of the admonition the British children's writer Arthur Ransome directed toward prospective readers of Slocum's narrative: those 'who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once'."